Friday, January 16, 2009

HR gets back to some of it's old tricks in just plain old fabrication.

Human Rights Watch has condemned Israel for allegedly using white phosphorus weapons unlawfully in the conflict ......media including The Guardian, Times of London, Christian Science Monitor and CNN have repeated HRW's claims

What, the media has reported claims!! The nerve of them. Will HR demand that they also stop reported the claims of IDF spokesmen?

However, this charge has been disputed by the International Red Cross, which stated that it had no evidence to suggest that white phosphorus is being used improperly or illegally by Israel.

They then provide an excerpt from an AP story quoting an ICRC expert. But they leave out an important point he made,

However, Herby said evidence is still limited because of the difficulties of gaining access to Gaza........

And the BBC,

Yet again, journalistic professionalism is thrown out of the window in the BBC's desperate attempts to attack and sully Israel

How?

The article states that "BBC journalists in Gaza and Israel have compiled detailed accounts of the claims." Who are these BBC journalists in Gaza? On the basis that foreign press have not been allowed access to Gaza, one can only assume that these supposedly neutral observers are, in fact, Palestinians

OMG! The BBC actually takes the word of Palestinian journalists and reports the views of Palestinian eyewitnesses. Don't they know that all Arabs are liars?

Don't you just love the smell of bigotry in the air in the morning?

Which takes us back to the white phosphorous story. HR continued by noting a Ynet news story claiming that one Hamas mortar that landed in Israel contained white phosphorous. The story quoted a 'security chief' from a regional council. Though HR hasn't the slightest doubt about the word of "this supposedly neutral observer" who is, in fact, Israeli [cue: audible intake of breath].

Having no basis to criticise what he actually says, HR go for the personal attack from, can you believe it, Melanie Phillips,

He is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist 'Red' party.

And HR, ever the unintentional practitioners of extreme irony, tell us about their online petition,

The petition stated, "I call on the media to provide balanced, objective coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and not rely on information from Hamas - a terrorist organization - as a source of news. I demand that the use of images and headlines that misrepresent current events to the detriment of the State of Israel be stopped immediately."

It's hilarious to see a stridently partisan and dishonest mob like HR demanding "balanced" and "objective coverage" - the very last thing that they actually want, evidenced by the attack on Mads Gilbert.

As HR consistently demonstrate, any thing that is to "the detriment of the State of Israel " is, by definition, a misrepresentation. The logic of this statement suggests that HR would be quite OK with anything that might "misrepresent the current situation" to the benefit of Israel, ie Israeli propaganda. I'm sure they didn't mean to suggest this, but it is obviously true, as they show with every 'Media Critique'.

Naturally, while Hamas is not a valid source of information, HR will continue to take the word of IDF spokesmen as the word of God.

It's a measure of HRs fierce commitment to fighting bias that it is shocked that the official pronouncements of the IDF could be described as "propaganda". Don't these stupid journalists realise that only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth passes from the pure lips of IDF spokesmen?